Feliz Cumpleaños a Mi

My birthday was on Thursday. Birthdays are nice. While it made me happy to celebrate mine here, I loved all the emails and messages I got from family and friends back home. It means so much to have people think of me, miss me.

I had my private Spanish class in the morning and my teacher wished me a very sweet happy birthday and gave me Toberlone. If it's not Swiss, it's not chocolate, according to her.While teaching my second class of the day, my students sang happy birthday to me in English and gave me hugs and besos.

I took a lovely little nap before my friend Leti came over early to help me get ready for my party. We walked her bike to the grocery store so we could load up the basket with our purchases--wine is heavy! Thankfully, I found brie at the store because as I'm know to say around D.C.: it's not a party without brie. I went to the frozen food section and saw that there are exactly two choices of frozen pizza. I bought two of each. There is, however, a whole aisle of Chilean wines, as there should be. Leti and I made our choices based on how pretty the labels are. Shhhhh, don't tell any Chileans that.

We ate an entire pizza ourselves while waiting for friends to come. We had a great little international group consisting of Americans, a Brit, a Venezuelan, a Chilean, and a Polish (what is the word for one person from Poland?) We played a game that's a cross between charades and Taboo. I nearly died laughing. I had a carmely, flakey cake and they sang to me in a mix of English and Spanish.